EX-ATHEIST POLICE DETECTIVE EXAMINES THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS CHRIST AND BECOMES A CHRISTIAN

One undisputed historical fact among historians and scholars, even skeptics, is that Jesus Christ was crucified under Pontius Pilate, just as the Bible states.

Ex-atheist police detective J. Warner Wallace examines the resurrection accounts of Jesus Christ by using his 30+ years of experience in examining cold case files. What he ends up discovering turns him into a Christian.

PROOF OF GOD: 300 PROPHECIES THAT JESUS FULFILLED

ZEITGEIST DEBUNKED: JESUS IS NOT A COPY OF PAGAN GODS

IS THERE ANY EVIDENCE FOR JESUS OUTSIDE THE BIBLE?

"Let’s review what we’ve learned from hostile pagan and Jewish sources describing Jesus. We’ll do our best to discount the anti-Christian bias we see in the sources, just as we discounted the pro-Christian bias we think might exist in some versions of the writing of Josephus. Many elements of the Biblical record are confirmed by these hostile accounts, in spite of the fact they deny the supernatural power of Jesus:

Jesus was born and lived in Palestine. He was born, supposedly, to a virgin and had an earthly father who was a carpenter. He was a teacher who taught that through repentance and belief, all followers would become brothers and sisters. He led the Jews away from their beliefs. He was a wise man who claimed to be God and the Messiah. He had unusual magical powers and performed miraculous deeds. He healed the lame. He accurately predicted the future. He was persecuted by the Jews for what He said, betrayed by Judah Iskarioto. He was beaten with rods, forced to drink vinegar and wear a crown of thorns. He was crucified on the eve of the Passover and this crucifixion occurred under the direction of Pontius Pilate, during the time of Tiberius. On the day of His crucifixion, the sky grew dark and there was an earthquake. Afterward, He was buried in a tomb and the tomb was later found to be empty. He appeared to His disciples resurrected from the grave and showed them His wounds. These disciples then told others Jesus was resurrected and ascended into heaven. Jesus’ disciples and followers upheld a high moral code. One of them was named Matthai. The disciples were also persecuted for their faith but were martyred without changing their claims. They met regularly to worship Jesus, even after His death.

Not bad, given this information is coming from ancient accounts hostile to the Biblical record. While these non-Christian sources interpret the claims of Christianity differently, they affirm the initial, evidential claims of the Biblical authors (much like those who interpret the evidence related to Kennedy’s assassination and the Twin Tower attacks come to different conclusions but affirm the basic facts of the historical events). Is there any evidence for Jesus outside the Bible? Yes, and the ancient non-Christian interpretations (and critical commentaries) of the Gospel accounts serve to strengthen the core claims of the New Testament."

4 HISTORICAL FACTS THAT GIVE EVIDENCE TO THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS CHRIST

NEW FORENSIC EVIDENCE VALIDATES THE SHROUD OF TURIN AND THE RESURRECTION OF THE PERSON IN IT

Comparing the Gospel accounts and other scriptures of Jesus with the overwhelming forensic evidence found on the Shroud of Turin, the odds are calculated to be 1 in 282 billion that the image of the man on the shroud is not Jesus.

The image of the face on the Shroud is the only known image in the world that is capable of creating a 3d face with the correct natural contours in a device called the VP-8 that analyzes the light and dark to turn a 2d image into 3d:

"Designed in the 1970's for evaluating x-rays and for other imaging purposes, the VP-8 Image Analyzer is an analog device that converts image density (lights and darks) into vertical relief (shadows and highlights). When applied to normal photographs, the result was a distorted and inaccurate image. However, when it was applied to the Shroud, the result was an accurate, topographic image showing the correct, natural relief characteristics of a human form. These results are often referred to as three-dimensional."

A sample was taken from a damaged part of the Shroud to carbon date it. What was found is a date around 1300 AD, giving headlines that the Shroud was not the burial cloth of Jesus. In 2000, a couple had examined pictures of the Shroud and discovered that another cloth material may have been woven in with the original linen cloth. It was discovered under closer examination that cotton material was indeed mixed in with the original linen cloth to repair a damaged part of the Shroud:

"Many experts have stood by a 1988 carbon-14 dating of scraps of the cloth carried out by labs in Oxford, Zurich and Arizona that dated it from 1260 to 1390, which, of course, would rule out its used during the time of Christ.

The new test, by scientists at the University of Padua in northern Italy, used the same fibers from the 1988 tests but disputes the findings. The new examination dates the shroud to between 300 BC and 400 AD, which would put it in the era of Christ.

It determined that the earlier results may have been skewed by contamination from fibers used to repair the cloth when it was damaged by fire in the Middle Ages, the British newspaper reported. The cloth has been kept at the cathedral since 1578."

THE UNINTENTIONAL EYEWITNESS SUPPORT OF THE GOSPELS

An interesting take on examining the Gospel accounts by J. Warner Wallace, a cold-case detective who has 30+ years of experience in the field.

Before he came to be a Christian, he examined the supposed eyewitness accounts found in the Gospels finding that they have a striking resemblance to actual eyewitness accounts he is use to working with as being a detective.

It bothered him how strikingly real they all sound because of the variance of view points shared among the disciples based on the same events. It was the fact that these Gospels accounts don't match each other(though non-contradicting) in so many instances that lead him to believe these were not fabricated accounts.

He use to run an experiment in front of his youth group where he would have someone run up and slap him on the side of the head and run off the stage. He would ask the individual audience members to explain to him what they saw, and even though they all saw it together, their answers had great variances.

ARGUMENTS FOR THE VALIDITY OF THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS CHRIST BY DR. WILLIAM LANE CRAIG

“The Gospels were written in such temporal and geographical proximity to the events they record that it would have been almost impossible to fabricate events. Anyone who cared to could have checked out the accuracy of what they reported. The fact that the disciples were able to proclaim the resurrection in Jerusalem in the face of their enemies a few weeks after the crucifixion shows that what they proclaimed was true, for they could never have proclaimed the resurrection under such circumstances had it not occurred.

The Gospels could not have been corrupted without a great outcry on the part of orthodox Christians. Against the idea that there could have been a deliberate falsifying of the text, no one could have corrupted all the manuscripts. Moreover, there is no precise time when the falsification could have occurred, since, as we have seen, the New Testament books are cited by the church fathers in regular and close succession. The text could not have been falsified before all external testimony, since then the apostles were still alive and could repudiate any such tampering with the Gospels.

The miracles of Jesus were witnessed by hundreds of people, friends and enemies alike; that the apostles had the ability to testify accurately to what they saw; that the apostles were of such doubtless honesty and sincerity as to place them above suspicion of fraud; that the apostles, though of low estate, nevertheless had comfort and life itself to lose in proclaiming the gospel; and that the events to which they testified took place in the civilized part of the world under the Roman Empire, in Jerusalem, the capital city of the Jewish nation. Thus, there is no reason to doubt the apostles’ testimony concerning the miracles and resurrection of Jesus. It would have been impossible for so many to conspire together to perpetrate such a hoax. And what was there to gain by lying? They could expect neither honor, nor wealth, nor worldly profit, nor fame, nor even the successful propagation of their doctrine. Moreover, they had been raised in a religion that was vastly different from the one they preached. Especially foreign to them was the idea of the death and resurrection of the Jewish Messiah. This militates against their concocting this idea. The Jewish laws against deceit and false testimony were very severe, which fact would act as a deterrent to fraud.

Suppose that no resurrection or miracles occurred: how then could a dozen men, poor, coarse, and apprehensive, turn the world upside down? If Jesus did not rise from the dead, declares Ditton, then either we must believe that a small, unlearned band of deceivers overcame the powers of the world and preached an incredible doctrine over the face of the whole earth, which in turn received this fiction as the sacred truth of God; or else, if they were not deceivers, but enthusiasts, we must believe that these extremists, carried along by the impetus of extravagant fancy, managed to spread a falsity that not only common folk, but statesmen and philosophers as well, embraced as the sober truth. Because such a scenario is simply unbelievable, the message of the apostles, which gave birth to Christianity, must be true.

Belief in Jesus’ resurrection flourished in the very city where Jesus had been publicly crucified. If the people of Jerusalem thought that Jesus’ body was in the tomb, few would have been prepared to believe such nonsense as that Jesus had been raised from the dead. And, even if they had so believed, the Jewish authorities would have exposed the whole affair simply by pointing to Jesus’ tomb or perhaps even exhuming the body as decisive proof that Jesus had not been raised.

Three great, independently established facts—the empty tomb, the resurrection appearances, and the origin of the Christian faith—all point to the same marvelous conclusion: that God raised Jesus from the dead.”